Dear Editor,

As we go through our season of politically motivated strikes throughout the public sector, I am yet to hear one main question asked and answered: If it is so bad to work in the public sector, why does everybody want to get a job there?

In the context of how public servants behave these days, complaining how bad things are, how they are basically “starving”, why isn’t there an exodus from the sector for the doors of the private sector? It’s a conundrum worth exploring. If one is working in an environment that is particularly poor, one does not stay there for 10, 20, 45 years. It defies logic.

I will proffer an explanation why I think it’s so.

It’s simple, really. Ninety per cent of all these public sector workers would not last three months within the private sector — unionised or not. The lazy, self-centred, egotistic, uncaring attitude they posses would never work in the private sector. In addition to that, the poor work ethic that characterises the public sector would never work anywhere else. We have all been affected by it at some point.

So let us not fool ourselves into believing that things are so bad in the public sector that it warrants strike after strike. It’s a barefaced lie.

The public sector, we must understand, is the fifth column in this country. Very unpatriotic and easily manipulated by the People’s National Party (PNP). We all know that. That is why the PNP believes it owns Jamaica.

The PNP was good at one thing over its 18.5 years in power and that’s stacking the public sector with their supporters. The public sector was kept inefficient and a drag on the public purse by the PNP. So the sector has myriad allowances that were piled on year after year to maintain workers’ support of the PNP.

What was the effect of that policy? A “run-wid-it” mentality that drove our debt to gross domestic product (GDP) well over 100 per cent. It went near or over 150 per cent at one time, all in an effort to keep the burgeoning, inefficient, and backward public sector going.

The PNP borrowed and borrowed to the point that we had to borrow to pay back what we borrowed. We should never forget that. Never! It cannot be that we are going back to a time when we dreaded hearing the budget read because we knew more taxes were coming.

The PNP is to blame for the burden the public sector has become on government coffers.

Fabian Lewis

tyronelewis272@gmail.com